Rudy Haase
Rudy Haase
iN Memoriam
Environmentalist, naval architect, yachtsman, and political activist.
Martin Rudolph Haase, born April 1st, 1922, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died in Chester, Nova Scotia, August 22, 2017, at the age of 95, of cardiac amyloidosis.
Rudy grew up in Shorewood, WI, attended Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC, where he studied art under Josef Albers, architecture under Lawrence Kocher, and physics under Peter Bergmann and Albert Einstein (whom Rudy took sailing).
He transferred to the University of Michigan and graduated with a degree in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.
Joining the U.S. Navy during World War II, he served as damage control officer on the battleship USS Iowa and participated in the battle of Leyte Gulf and the battle of the Phillipine Sea. As boat officer, he was the first American naval officer to set foot in Japan after the war, at the Yokosuka Naval Base near Tokyo, three days before Japan’s formal surrender.
After briefly attending the University of Wisconsin, he married Florence Cushing Wellington in 1949. They sailed together from Maine to the Bahamas aboard Rudy’s ketch Diablesse, which he sailed for fifty-one years. After “coming ashore” in 1952, they resided in Belmont, MA in the winter and East Brooksville, Maine during the summer. He founded a publishing business, Wellington Books, which focused on environmental and yachting titles.
Rudy was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and the family emigrated to Canada in 1967, settling in East Chester, Nova Scotia. Rudy bought Bluenose Boatyard in 1967 and built wooden yachts during the 1970s, some of them his own designs.
An opponent of uranium mining (and nuclear war), Rudy campaigned for 30 years as chairman of Citizens Against Uranium Mining, for a permanent ban in Nova Scotia, which passed the legislature in year 1981.
An opponent of nuclear testing, Rudy authored a UN resolution to stop the US from using Bikini Island, then a trusteeship, as a test site. (Boston Globe)
In 1954, Rudy founded Friends of Nature and continued to serve as Executive Secretary of Friends of Canada Nature Society after moving to Canada. He spent much of his time on conservation issues. (McGlathery, Costa Rica, Prince Rupert Islands). In 2007, filmmaker Neal Livingston produced a documentary, “Rudy Haase: Canada’s Unknown Environmentalist,” which focused on his conservation work.
An early board member of the Nova Scotia Nature Trust, he promoted conservation easements, putting them on several properties including Shelter Island on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore.
In 1970, Mickie and Rudy founded the Chester Educational Foundation and ran a private elementary school for seven years.
The recipient of many awards for his environmental work and political activism, Rudy Received the Order of Nova Scotia in 2015. [citation read]
He is survived by three sons and four grandchildren.
Rudy Haase
a documentary by NEAL LIVINGSTON
A biography filmed in 2007 about Canada’s great unknown environmental and social activist, Rudy Haase. 85 years old at the time of filming, Rudy was born in the USA and lived in Nova Scotia with his wife Mickey.
His life’s work has involved preserving wilderness in Canada, the USA, Costa Rica, and New Zealand. In Nova Scotia Rudy Haase has been active for more than four decades on many environmental issues from fighting against the clear cutting and pesticide spraying of forests to opposing uranium mining.
The film is also a primer on environmentalism, from Richard St. Barbe Baker to Helen and Scott Nearing, all illustrated by many well-known Nova Scotia environmental battles.